Over the last few weeks, you’ve been submitting your images for the Node and Development‘s stem cell cover competition. We received a large number of entries, and you’ve proved to us that stem cells – both in their natural environments and in a dish – can be just as beautiful as the embryos that normally grace our covers. After quite some deliberation, we’ve narrowed down the submissions to a short-list of five.

Now it’s your turn to vote for your favourite. The winning image will appear on a cover of Development, and will also feature on the new stem cell pages we’re developing for the journal’s website.

3. Induced pluripotent stem cell colony surrounded by non-reprogrammed and feeder cells. Mouse embryonic fibroblasts were infected with viruses encoding transcription factors Oct4, Sox2 and Klf4 to reprogram them to pluripotency. A day 14 reprogramming culture was stained for E-CADHERIN (green), NANOG (red) and EZH2 (magenta). Dapi is shown in blue. This procedure can also be applied to human cells. The discovery of somatic cell nuclear reprogramming to pluripotency was awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.

4. A rendered image of a primary neuronal stem cell culture in which cells were labeled with different fluorescently labeled proteins that differentiate between stem cells (orange/yellow) and their neuronal ‘offspring’ (blue/ green/ purple).

5. Confocal image of an adult mouse hippocampus, the area of the brain where new memories are formed. Astrocytes (green) were observed around the granule cell layer of the dentate gyrus, as indicated by cell nuclei (red). Some astrocytes were derived from neural precursor cell population (blue).

I am very enthusiastic about this competition, however I am surprised that every time option N°5 is close to losing the first place it quickly increase the votes:
18th March: Option N°5 got from 8 to 400 votes in one night
21st March (2.30-2.50 AM GMT): during this time I was refreshing the website and I could see that one vote was added every 5 seconds for approximately 20 minutes and suddenly stopped at 755 votes.
26th March: Option N°5 increase from 781 to 899.
This is really a strange trend, considering that during rest of the time not many votes
were added to option N°5.
I cannot understand what is really happening but I think people who is voting deserve this competition is free of any kind of fraud.

I am very enthusiastic about this competition, however I am surprised every time option N°5 is close to losing the first place it quickly increase the votes:
18th March: Option N°5 got from 8 to 400 votes in one night
21st March (2.30-2.50 AM GMT): during this time I was refreshing the website and I could see that one vote was added every 5 seconds for approximately 20 minutes and suddenly stopped at 755 votes.
26th March: Option N°5 increase from 781 to 899.
This is really a strange trend, considering that during rest of the time not many votes
were added to option N°5.

I cannot understand what is really happening but I think people who is voting deserve this competition is free of any kind of fraud.

Thanks for your comments. I agree that it is somewhat surprising that both images 1 and 5 have received far more votes than the other submissions, and I am also monitoring this. The voting system is set up to block multiple votes from a single person (in as much as this is possible), and the site usage stats tell me that the clear majority of visits to the page have been unique visits, coming from multiple geographical locations.
I can tell you that there has been some considerable promotion of the competition, and image 5 in particular, via Twitter – obviously we have no control over the fact that this may well lead to increased numbers of votes for this image. It is also inevitable that there will be some personal element to the voting, and that some of the authors will be more active in encouraging their friends and colleagues to vote than others.
However, from a technical point of view, I do not see any indication of voting fraud.

I hope this clarifies things, and reassures you that we are monitoring the vote as much as possible.

It is a fact that social networks are a great promoting tool, and I could perfectly understand if 200 votes where generated in 20 min. However this has become a pattern. Everytime option N°1 is ahead, option N°5 gains a doubtful quantity of votes in a astonishing short time. Not to mention the fact that the votes are generated around the same time.

This is turning into a great competition between two excellent images, #1 and #5. In fact, the five shortlisted images all look great and all could appear on the cover of Development in its future issues. So far it appears that more people want to see image #5 to win the competition.

I have looked again through the site usage statistics, and I can only reiterate what I said above – namely that there is no evidence that the same person (computer) is voting multiple times. I don’t have access to the stats for the vote itself, but any irregularities should show up in the site stats. I am therefore confident that the voting reflects people’s genuine choices – influenced by social media perhaps, but fully legitimate.
It is sad to see this competition descend into accusations that the vote is being manipulated – as comments above have remarked, all five are fantastic images and we would be glad to see any of them on Development’s cover.

I think that the competition has been held to the good standard that can be expected from a serious popular voting competition. As you said before, Katherine: “The voting system is set up to block multiple votes from a single person (in as much as this is possible),…”.

There will always be ways to go around the safeguards or hacking the vote, but there is only so much you can do to prevent that. Good faith should still be kept, since the organisers have made the effort of putting this competition together.

Katherine, I believe your intentions are honest. But it is a fact well known that nowadays there are many programs that can easily hide or change an IP. The fact that the votes don’t come from a single computer proves nothing. Again, as Esteban said above I think you should see the vote’s timing.

I am not a researcher on Stem Cells, and know little about the journal of Development before. When I was told there were some fantastic images through a link, I just clicked and voted the one I like most without considering whether other people got the message at the same time and may act at the same moment. I chose the one least like cells, but more bright and colorful, as I saw beautiful cell images very often, but hardly to see a painting or garden like cell image.

It is really annoying and disappointing that despite Katherine’s assurance some people are still making unsubstantiated claims about the voting process. I know that many of my colleagues have voted one of the five images but only one vote was counted apparently because there is only one IP address in our work place (I don’t understand how it works), so just accept the fact that there is no perfect voting system and have some faith in the current one.

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